A reasonable dissonance. - Modern Cannibal Magazine

How many paintings did Van gogh throw away?

Someone recently asked me about the Modern Cannibal branding. I had to admit that I just liked the way it sounded at first. I came up with the name way before I ever decided to put a website together, and when I pulled the trigger there it was. It has that Mad magazine kind of feel when something is over the top. It has a certain pizzazz. It does have a deeper meaning however.

How do I know humans built the pyramids? Well…because there they are.

America as a country has been dragged through the mud now for quite some time. Being the most powerful, richest, healthiest, best looking, most diverse country the world has ever seen isn’t such a bad thing, but crowing about it takes all the cache out of it. When the rest of the world collectively can be seen rolling their eyes everytime we speak it makes us not get the call to the big parties. Of course being Americans we don’t care much because our parties are usually better anyway.

Something has changed however. We have a new collective citizenry who are not convinced that America is really all that great. As a matter of fact they have challenged the history of the united states all the way back to its beginnings. Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, The Dukes of Hazzard, you name it, if it is an institution of any sort, it has been given the furrowed brow of scrutiny. Where did they get these ideas from?

The young hate the old, the old hate the young. The right hates the left, the left despises the right. Entertainment has decided to not entertain. Sports is decidedly unsportsmanlike. Our professions offer no safety nets anymore. Our world in the 21st century has stopped making sense. Everything you could point to as being atypically American has been subjugated.

But why?

In the year 1994 I ate a bunch of mushrooms and unleashed a theory about how humans were not going to be able to handle the internet. Didn’t go over well then, still really doesn’t go over that well now, but I can see a tidal shift at this point. See; the internet makes the printing press look small in comparison. Who would dare say that the printing press had no impact on humanity? You could look this stuff up in your encyclopedia but you threw them all away because of the world wide web.

To give you a sense of scale lets rewind back to world war 2. Hitler started a war basically against the rest of the world and set upon wiping a whole race of people off of it. Sounds like “Lord of the Rings” but with liverwurst. What made the Germans of the time so efficient and almost unstoppable was their note taking abilities. They tried to destroy their carefully crafted lists and notes, but of the ones that remain we were able to advance medicine and the sciences by an exponential rate. We could trace the lineage and the bank accounts of the victims of places like Auschwitz and Birkenau. They literally recorded the evil they inflicted on those poor souls and from that raw data they bestowed a horribly won knowledge to the rest of the world. Who knew ignoring human rights could be so profitable?

They were able to do all of that with paper and pencils. Typewriters and filing cabinets. Early radio and weinersnitchel.

I have to ask the most important question of the 21st century: What would the world look like if Hitler had the internet? Anne Frank hid at least for awhile, how successful you think you would be at hiding today?

So, modern cannibal? well.. it does mean something to me; the only thing we have to measure ourselves against is a past version of ourselves and that makes us all Modern Cannibals. We have evolved over time to become something we consider better, but if we are not careful we will make liars of ourselves. To be honest I’m not sure we are something better. Maybe we can never escape the gravity of a ravenous society? Modern Cannibal to me is the perfect duality that makes being human a very confusing proposition. Like a child going to war.

The world has had racism and war, and rape, torture, stolen lands etc etc since time immemorial. But we have to learn from it. We have to grow. If you were in a relationship with someone who would throw your past at you everytime you tried to better yourself, would you be happy? That’s the definition of a toxic relationship.

Understanding how societies work is a scary business.

We don’t need a revolution, we need evolution. and maybe some sauerkraut. Kraut is versatile.

Be good to yourself and others.